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1. The Winter of Love
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
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Q 1 Gavin Newsom was sworn in as the mayor of San Francisco in January 2004. It had not been an easy climb to the top. Mayor Newsom entered office following a highly contested political campaign during which he foundfewalliesinSanFrancisco’slesbianandgaycommunity.Nonetheless , newly elected, young, handsome, married to an equally attractive woman, and charismatic, Newsom showed political promise. Among his first actions as mayor, he attended President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address and heard Bush’s call for using constitutional processes to restrict marriage to different-sex couples.1 This troubled Newsom. Although the gay and lesbian community had not played a large role in his election, he recognized same-sex couples as members of his constituency and perceived their exclusion from marriage as discriminatory—and he had an idea how to fix it.2 When he returned to San Francisco, Newsom reached out to lesbian and gay rights activists about his burgeoning idea, asking them whether they thought it would be helpful to the community. After a few meetings and the encouragement of representatives from three activist organizations, on February twelfth, around noon, Mayor Newsom made history by directing city hall to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in San Francisco. No one involved in the whirlwind planning expected that more than a handful of licenses would be issued before a court intervened c h a p t e r 1 THE WINTER OF LOVE This really was our generation’s Stonewall. It was an absolutely unprecedented, thrilling, amazing, overwhelming experience. . . . It just was this moment of love. That’s why they call it ‘the winter of love’ because it was a spontaneous outpouring of joy and love. And the whole city was just bubbly. —Marriage equality activist 2 Queering Marriage to stop the license-granting, so the mayor chose the recipients of those first licenses carefully. First up were Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, icons of the lesbian and gay rights movement and partners for fifty years. Martin and Lyon married in a semi-private ceremony in a city hall office, with a dozen or so public officials, lesbian and gay rights activists, and members of the press in attendance. Soon after, city hall opened its doors to any couple who wanted to get married. So began what many participants called “the winter of love.” The timing of these events owed, in part, to Newsom’s desire to bring his idea to fruition as quickly as possible,but it was also strategic. Beginning in the late 1990s, advocates for same-sex marriage designated February twelfth as “Freedom to Marry Day.” Same-sex couples marked the occasion by traveling to their local city hall and requesting marriage licenses, making visible their exclusion from this cultural rite of passage. In 2004, as Martin and Lyon discretely married inside city hall, gay and lesbian couples gathered outside city hall with plans to request marriage licenses.Among them was Keith, a forty-five-yearold lawyer who had been committed to his partner, Tim, a forty-threeyear -old policy analyst, for seventeen years. (Keith and Tim, as well as the names of all respondents discussed in this book, are pseudonyms.) The year prior, as Keith and Tim sat down to complete their tax returns, they were frustrated yet again that each had to check the “single ” box. It felt like a lie to represent themselves as unmarried after over a decade and a half of commitment. on top of that, they knew filing jointly would give them significant tax advantages.After mulling this over for several months,the two decided to become active in advocating for marriage equality. A more personal reason also motivated them: Tim’s parents are an interracial couple, and Tim grew up acutely aware that the law for much of the twentieth century would not have permitted his parents to marry.3 He knew what marriage meant to his parents and his family, and he saw that the law can change. Despite their hopes that this would be the year they received a marriage license, Keith and Tim assumed they would be denied licenses. Along with the other couples lined up outside city hall, they intended to use the rejection as an opportunity to protest their exclusion from marriage. Some in the crowd had heard rumors that this year would be different,but no one knew for sure.In the short time that Newsom’s [44.197.114.92] Project MUSE (2024-03-29...